FHG Archives - Page 22 of 144

Here’s Help For A Huge Hardship

April 16, 2014 Ted Holt

Multimillion-row tables are more and more common in IBM i shops these days. Querying those monsters can be a strain on the system. Fortunately, IBM gave us some help in DB2 for i 7.1.

The help comes in the form of a new wrinkle in indexing. The smart people who produce the world’s greatest relational database management system found a way to store aggregate (summary) information in encoded vector indexes. Here’s an example.

Assume a table (physical file) of sales history, such as this one:

create table Sales
  ( ID                integer as identity,
    Invoice           dec  (9,0),
    Line              dec  (3,0),
    InvoiceDate

…

Admin Alert: Elements Of An IBM i Incident Management Plan, Part 2

April 16, 2014 Joe Hertvik

Last issue, I started outlining how to set up an IBM i incident management plan, going through four of the seven elements that are crucial for IBM i monitoring and response. This issue, let’s finish up and discuss the final elements an IBM i incident management template should provide.

The Elements Of IBM i Incident Management, Revisited

As presented last time, here are the critical elements every IBM i incident management plan should include.

What type of monitoring are you doing: Manual, automatic, or hybrid?
What are you monitoring for?
Call trees: Who should be alerted when a problem

…

Embedded SQL Exception/Error Handling

April 2, 2014 Paul Tuohy

At times, I wish embedded SQL would act more like RPG. A case in point is with exception/error handling.

Embedded SQL assumes you are using SQLCODE or SQLSTATE to check whether or not each statement worked. In RPG, the equivalent would be have an E extender on every file operation code and checking the %error() after the operation code.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get embedded SQL to cause the program to fail if it gets an unexpected error–just like RPG? Well, you can, just by adding one line of code after each SQL statement.

Figure 1 shows

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Search Source Members For Two Or More Strings

April 2, 2014 Hey, Ted

I have used option 25 of the Work with Members Using PDM (WRKMBRPDM) for years to look for character strings in source physical file members. Is there a way to search for two or more strings at once?

–T.

It’s not possible with that option. You might want to use option -e of Qshell’s grep utility.

Let’s say you want to find all instances of invnbr and invoicenumber in source physical file SRC in library TST. Here’s the command you would need to use:

$
grep -in -e 'invnbr
>
invoicenumber
>
'  /qsys.lib/tst.lib/src.file/*

The first, third, and fifth lines

…

Admin Alert: Elements Of An IBM i Incident Management Plan, Part 1

April 2, 2014 Joe Hertvik

How do you react when there’s an issue with your IBM i partition? This isn’t an easy question as IBM i incidents can involve many different areas, including networking/infrastructure, applications, storage, performance, and third-party vendors. This issue and next, I’ll outline the critical elements of an IBM i incident management plan and how it helps you quickly determine what to do and who to call when problems come up.

The Elements Of IBM i Incident Management

Here are the critical elements I believe every IBM i incident management plan should include.

What type of monitoring are you doing: Manual, automatic,

…

DB2 For i Table Function Performance Considerations

March 19, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

In my prior tip, I covered some guidelines on when to use scalar user defined functions (UDF) and the potential performance hit they can impose on a query.

In this tip, I’m going to follow up with a few additional guidelines about user defined table functions (UDTFs) in DB2 for i and show how they may impact query performance.

Once again, I’m using data from the Microsoft AdventureWorks sample database that has been exported to DB2 for i. Shown below is a sample UDTF named “Transactions” that combines the data from the transaction history and transaction history archive tables:

…

Quick And Handy RPG Input

March 19, 2014 Ted Holt

Life was so much simpler when terminals and printers ran on twinax, Java was an island or coffee, and all my data was structured in records. I don’t have to fool with wiring at present, and the Java programming language is to me only an occasional, plodding nuisance, but data is a different story.

Unstructured, non-relational data comes at me from all directions at an ever-increasing velocity, and no wonder, as stream I/O is the standard for much of the computing world. (For the benefit of anyone who’s interested, I’ve added a second article to the end of this article.

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Graphically Setting Up TCP/IP Host Routes With System i Navigator

March 19, 2014 Hey, Joe

I read your article on setting up IBM i TCP/IP host routes. But the article only contained green screen commands for host routing. Is there a way to graphically set up IBM i routes?

–Jose

You can graphically work with TCP/IP Host Routes by using the System i Navigator program that comes with IBM i Access for Windows (OpsNav).

To get to a partition’s host routes for IPv4 configurations in OpsNav, open the Network→TCP/IP Configuration→IPv4→Routes node under your target partition. To work with a partition’s IPv6 host routes, open the Network→TCP/IP Configuration→IPv6→Routes node. Your OpsNav tree will look something

…

Who Needs Custom Perspectives In RSE?

March 12, 2014 Susan Gantner

Who needs custom perspectives in RSE? Just about everyone. At least everyone could probably benefit from them. As you know if you’ve read my earlier tips, I’m a huge fan of the Remote System Explorer that is part of WDSC, RDi and/or RDP. But I rarely use it as it comes “out of the box” from IBM/Rational. I customize it in many ways, including creating my own custom perspectives.

I use custom perspectives primarily for two purposes:

To provide a good target for “reset perspective. . . “
To create special-purpose editing environments.

In this tip, we’ll look at

…

Quick And Handy RPG Output

March 12, 2014 Ted Holt

Are you one of those people who thrive on complexity? Do you love bureaucracy and paperwork? If so, you’re reading the wrong newsletter. I like everything to be as simple as possible. Today I have a simple routine that is a time-saver for me. I hope you find it useful.

My little routine lets me print anything with minimal effort. I can print character variables, numeric variables, data structures, the results of expressions, and anything else that can be assigned to a character variable. I developed it because I needed a quick way to add output to RPG programs without

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